blog@Yantrajaal

Traffic jams are an integral part of roads in India -- it does not matter if you are at Dalhousie Square in the heart of Calcutta or you are at Panagarh on the Grand Trunk Road -- and when you are stuck you have a lot of time to think on your hands. You begin with cursing people around about their lack of civic sense and road etiquette but eventually you resign yourself to the situation and start thinking about the problem analytically. Could there be a game theoretic approach to the problem ? To begin with let us define a general traffic jam a little more precisely so that the problem is more tractable and amenable to a mathematical analysis. Anybody who has lived in IIT Kharagpur for any length of time knows that just outside the campus there is a railway level crossing (actually two) which are a reliable source of traffic jams on a regular and repeatable basis. Every day, 365 days a year, the gates close two or three times every hour and each time when they reopen there is a a...

At 12,000+ feet above MSL, Tunganath is the highest Shiva Temple in the world.  On our way to Gangotri, we stopped at Guptakashi and made a detour to Tunganath. This is where we saw the first snow capped peaks. Our trek started out from a tiny hamlet called Chopta, which is as far as our car could go. From here it is a 3 km, 3500 feet climb to Tunganath.  We walked through some of very beautiful landscape and finally passed the tree line. Above this point ( shown in the picture above ) there were no more trees.  and there was snow on the ground, left over from last winter ( 2010-2011). The summer of 2011 had not been warm enough to melt these snow deposits!  This was the last sign post before Tunganath, and then we arrived ! The weather was turning chilly and with the mist and fog rolling in, it was darkness at noon. Having reached Tunganath, I thought that I should say somet...

Gangotri is the mythical fountainhead of the Ganga and the Gangetic civilisation around which the social, reliegios and cultural life of India has evolved. We visited Gangotri on Dipannita ( also known as Deepawali ) on 26th October and took a dip in the icy waters of the Bhagirathi, as the Ganga is known at its source. Here are the pictures. We set our sights on the distant peaks and start from Rishikesh and follow the river upstream. The first place of interest is Devaprayag where the Bhagirathi meets the Alakananda and is henceforth known as the Ganga. In these pictures we see the confluence of the two rivers. The one on the left is the Alakananda and the one on the right is the Bhagirathi that originates at Gangotri. While we intend to go to Gangotri, we follow the Alakananda because we have some of visiting Tunganath on the way. We next touch Rudraprayag ( made famous by Jim Corbett and  his true story of the Man Eating Leopard of Rud...